is Self too hard? (was:evolutive architecture)

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

I am afraid I won't be able to give you more than a very short response 
and I am not sure most members of this list are interested in this 
discussion.

> Sorry, since it is so few bytes I though t there would be no problem
> at all!

Your email was 81 KBytes.

> > You presented a very large number of analogies, but no concrete
> > advice at all.
>
> First of all it is a position paper!!!! Soon there will be available
> a Scientific Report with 200 pages!!!

Ok.

> > That might be appropriate if the presentation will be in a
> > mostly philosophical forum.
>
> Come on!
> I really do not understand you....What do you want to convey?
> All the references I gave in the paper come from active
> software developers!!!

All I was saying is that some conferences, like POPL (Principals or 
Progamming Languages) are more philosophical while others, like OOPSLA, 
are more practical. I don't know what the workshop you sent this paper 
to is like, so I was saying that it was probably ok as it is.

> Yes, they do not try because they cannot even understand it!!

Check out these student's experiences with Self:

   http://www.daimi.aau.dk/dAOP/report-group4.pdf

There were some things they liked, a lot that they didn't. But they 
didn't have the kinds of problems you seem to imply the "most important 
researchers" are having with the language.

> For
> example AspectJ I have been trying to read something about it and
> attended an excellent demonstration at ECOOP'01 and I cannot
> understand it!!! I need to know much more.

You are an architect, not a computer scientist. So it is no big deal 
you didn't understand it. But if someone claiming to be a computer 
scientist took more than five minutes to grasp what AspectJ is all 
about then I would suggest they consider trying a different profession.

Now *understand* can mean several things. The first large Pascal 
program I ever saw was a chess program published in an old Byte 
magazine. The author had filled it with label declarations and gotos so 
that it was no better than any unstructured Basic code. It was obvious 
that he didn't understand what Pascal was all about. But he did 
undestand Pascal in the sense that he wrote a large working program in 
the language. I will not be at all amazed if you tell me many people 
don't "get" Self, but can't believe you if you say famous OO 
researchers are unable to program in it.

-- Jecel